The World's Only Brown Panda Is, Literally, One Of A Kind!

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Qizai is thought to be the only living panda in the world that has white and brown fur. The keeper of the seven-year-old male panda in China calls the animal 'gentle, funny and adorable' He was abandoned by his mother at two months old and bullied by his playmates during his childhood. However, the adorable bear has since grown into the healthy, adult giant panda he is today!

Abandoned by his mother and bullied by his playmates, giant panda Qizai had a hard childhood. However, the adorable bear, currently seven years old, has grown to be a super star in the animal world!

Abandoned by his mother and bullied by his playmates, giant panda Qizai had a hard childhood. However, the adorable bear, currently seven years old, has grown to be a super star in the animal world!Abandoned by his mother and bullied by his playmates, giant panda Qizai had a hard childhood. However, the adorable bear, currently seven years old, has grown to be a super star in the animal world!

Qizai, whose name means 'the seventh son', currently lives at the Foping Panda Valley. Before that Qizai lived at the Shaanxi Rare Wildlife Rescue.

Experts don't know yet the cause of Qizai's unusual fur colour.

When Qizai was a cub, he had been bullied by other pandas who would eat his bamboo.

He Xin, a 26-year-old Foping native, has taken care of Qizai for around two years. He spends up to 18 hours a day looking after the bear, getting up at 6am in the morning to feed him bamboo and going to bed at midnight after making sure that the panda sleeps well.

'He is slower than the other pandas, but he is also cuter,' says Mr He, adding Qizai is 'gentle, funny and adorable' animal.

Mr He says: 'All pandas here have names. When I call out their names, the other black-and-white pandas would react and come to me quickly, but for Qizai, it usually takes sometime to him to realise that.'

According to his keeper, Qizai eats more slowly than the others too.

However,

Since he reached adulthood, Qizai has been raised in a separate enclosure.

He is fed four to five times a day, and his meals range from bamboo, to milk to Chinese flour buns.The famous bear now weighs more than 100 kilograms (220 pounds), and can eat around 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of bamboo every day.

As the brown bear grows older, Chinese experts are now planning to arrange mating for Qizai, hoping that by observing and studying the appearance of his child, they would be one step closer to understanding the cause of the fur colour of Qizai, whose mother is black and white.

The keeper said the pandas from Shaanxi, a province in central China, have different appearance to those from south-west China's Sichuan province, where the giant pandas are thought to originate.

'The pandas in Shaanxi have lighter fur colour than the Sichuan pandas,' said Mr He.

'Some of them have dark brown fur around the stomach, but Qizai is the most brown panda of them all.'

Qizai was found as a two-month-old cub, weak and alone, by researchers in a nature reserve in Qinling Mountains in central China.

His mother had apparently abandoned him and disappeared into the jungle.

For his own safety, the researchers took him to the nearby Shaanxi Rare Wildlife Rescue, Breeding and Research Centre where he was given medical treatment and fed on panda milk saved by the centre's staff from other pandas.

He has since grown into the fine, eye-catching specimen he is today.

There are 1,864 wild pandas in the world, according to World Wildlife.

Pandas live mainly in bamboo forests high in the mountains of south-west China, mostly in Sichuan province, but they can also be found in Shaanxi province, where Qizai is from.

This September, The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said in a report that the giant panda is now classified as a 'vulnerable' instead of 'endangered' species, reflecting its growing numbers in the wild in China.

What could be the reason of his unique colour?

Katherine Feng, an American vet and member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, had the opportunities to take photos of Qizai in 2015.

Ms Feng said: 'Brown and white pandas have only been seen in the Qinling Mountains. The Qinling Mountain pandas are considered a different sub-species from those found in other mountain ranges.

'It is suspected that the brown and white colouring of pandas has a genetic basis, possible a result of a double recessive gene, a combination of genes or a dilution factor gene. Qi Zai's mother was black and white.'

There have only been five sightings of brown-and-white pandas since 1985.